


Mundanity

by Urbenmyth



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Abelism both external and internal, Abuse from the perspective of the abuser, Both can be true., a vaugely tragic take on a frankly very bad person
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-23
Updated: 2020-11-23
Packaged: 2021-03-09 18:01:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 976
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27680401
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Urbenmyth/pseuds/Urbenmyth
Summary: Martin wonders sometimes, you know. It's only natural. Was the Slaughter maybe inflaming his mother's hate? Some aspect of the Spiral blurring the line between father and son, or some thing of the Eye keeping his fathers image burnt into her head? Maybe some scheme of the Web, that's always a good general purpose entity to blame.As with so many things, deep down, he knows the truth.
Comments: 1
Kudos: 17





	Mundanity

Joan Blackwood coughs in her cold hospital room.

She's sick. She had been sick almost all her life. Ever since she was young. Ha. She had never truly had a youth, not really. Since her husband left her and her brat of a son hovered around treating her like some fragile doll, like he knew _better_ than her how to look after herself? Like she was a child? She’d never been happy. She’d thrown away her youth to Daniel and since then it had been tolerating Martin's constant pleas for attention.

She’d got sick. The doctors had said it wouldn’t be fatal, she’d just need care. Daniel didn’t care. Daniel never cared. She’d got a child and a sickness. Pain. Fatigue. Weakness. And a son that thought this made her an _invalid_.

She was sick.

And this was a world where sometimes, if you were sick, that sickness would whisper to you in a voice sweet as rotting fruit.

There were people who heard the voice of disease, telling them of beautiful things turned to rot, of rancid food and moldering houses and hearts gone black with need. It tells them of what it means to love, truly love, love stripped of kindness or compassion or joy or good.

Joan was not among them.

She was simply sick.

Hardly able to move, she sat and thought about her life. She had no happy memories, not really. They had been stolen from her, and her hatred was all she left now. For Daniel. Tall, handsome Daniel. He would have lived a happy life, wouldn’t he? Gone off with some model, no doubt, while she was stuck looking after his reject son. Bet he never thought of her.

Martin thought of her. Oh, him and his condescension, his arrogant “I know bests". Mum, you can’t do that. Mum, you need to do this. Just like his father. Always knew best, always standing over her with that smug grin and looking down at her. She knew the type he’d grown up to be. All false smiles and lies. Lied his way into work, you know. Lied to his boss. Conniving brat.

Mark her words, he’d grow up to break some young woman's heart, just like his father.

She could see it in his face. His handsome, familiar face.

She hates Daniel, and she hates Martin, and she hates the nurses who dreaded it when it was their shift with her, and she hates her family who took every excuse to not see her, and she hates the other old bastards here who avoid her whenever they could.

There is a song in this world.

Sometimes it is approximated on flutes and drums, but that is not _the_ song. _The_ song is played on swung fists and pulled triggers, on screamed slurs and hissed threats, on cries of rage and cries of fear. The angry and cruel and bigoted and hateful of this world hear the song, sometimes, and they march to it. They drown the world in blood and horrible, monstrous glory.

Joan does not hear the song. She never has.

She simply hates.

She sits, curled up, seething more and more.

The nurses try their best not to speak to her, no matter how polite they pretend to be. Her ears aren’t that bad. She can hear what they say. Her family too. Her brother doesn’t speak to her any more. He asked about Martin, and she told him the truth. How he was a lying little snake, just like his father. And she told him the truth about him.

And now he doesn’t come.

She watches the others sometimes, as kind children and grandchildren come over to see them in their twilight years. How loving couples hold hands even in old age. How they talk and play cards and laugh at jokes fewer and fewer people can get.

She hates them. Why should they have loving children and husbands, when she has a failure of a son and a bastard of a lover? Why should they be happy when all she has is hatred?

They invited her to join in their card games, at first. But they soon learnt not to.

She is so angry. And so lonely.

Far away, there is a place of fog and empty moors, or a place of faceless crowds in nameless streets, or a boat adrift in glass-still water, or an endless desert where the sun never rises, or a silent forest of dead trees, or an empty house without doors or windows. It looks like many places, because it isn’t a place, not really. It is despair and sorrow and numbness and fear. If it is a place, it is within your heart.

In that place-that-is-not-a-place, something reaches out. It finds someone who resonates with that place, and pours into them, and imbues them with the numb fear of endless empty days.

That person is not Joan.

She is simply lonely.

Joan sits there, no nurses, no family, no friends. Just her rage and her hatred.

And then the world breaks.

Not twists. Not spirals. Not goes strange or dark.

Just breaks. She cannot speak. Her body goes numb, and drops. Somewhere in her mind, beneath layers of rage and resentment and hate, she thinks she might be afraid.

She does not end.

There is no skeletal reaper, no black veins, no dark omen of mortality and extinction. The force called The End, or Terminus, or I-Am-Always-Dying, or The Necropolis, or The Open Grave, or The Final God, or a thousand other names?

It is elsewhere.

In a world full of gods and monsters, a blood vessel just burst in Joan Blackwood’s head.

There is no great revelation. No final lesson. No last minute realization.

Filled with nothing but loneliness and sickness and so much hate, Joan Blackwood simply dies.


End file.
